Geobloggers moves on

Geobloggers, one of the most useful and impressive social applications to come out of the initial frenzy of experimentation with mapping APIs that followed the release of Google Maps and then Earth, is no more. It all came down to time constraints, writes Dan Catt.

This leaves a big gap for those of us who quickly got used to having geotagged Flickr photos available in our field of view on Google Earth via Geobloggers’ dynamic network link. In the meantime, though, others have started to meet the demand that Dan showed was there. (Thanks Dan, BTW).

For example, you get the same functionality with the free and easy-to-use Panoramio (though it’s not for Flickr photos). Commercial photo sharing services Smugmug and Pixagogo are also both experimenting with KML feeds.

Flickr photos, in the meantime, can be searched with Flyr, a very capable search tool for geotagged Flickr photos. It returns a KML file pointing to photos that meet your search criteria. But it’s not an official Flickr service, it’s a clever hack.

Flickr doesn’t currently have a KML network link like what Geobloggers provided for Flickr photos and what Panoramio now does for its own pictures. Given that so many Flickr photos are geotagged, surely this cannot last? Or might an official solution be lacking because Flickr = Yahoo! and Google Earth ‚â† Yahoo!?